Apologies to all those who knew this already, but if you’ve been frustrated because you are situated outside the US and so much of Google Books will only give you “snippet view” because of the deals Google has signed with the organisations whose books it scanned, which restrict “full view” solely to US-based readers, there is a way round it.

Buy yourself a VPN (virtual private network) subscription for around $60 a year or so. As well as vastly adding to your net security, the VPN service routes your internet access through secure servers based in the US (and/or, in the case of the one I’m using, the UK), which if you use the US servers, will fool Google into thinking you must be US-based, meaning it will allow you full-view access to books that it would otherwise let you see only as snippet view.

This also works for other sites that only let you use their services if you are based in their country: the BBC, for example, will only give access to its full internet services, including the wonderful BBC iPlayer, which lets you watch BBC TV programmes on your computer, if you are UK-based, which at the moment I am not. But by routing my internet access through my VPN supplier’s server in London, I fool the Beeb into thinking I’m a legitimate UK-based net user ...